Design as Religion

Showing a graphic design student
around my hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland this Christmas I happened to
choose a route that led from one of the city’s oldest and most sacred
interiors, St. Giles Cathedral, consecrated in 1243, to one of its
newest, a design and contemporary culture store called Analogue, opened
in 2001.

Analogue strikes me as a sacred space; calm flagstones and pebbles
surround low minimalist tables, lecterns bear beautiful, illuminated
books, CDs, DVDs and magazines. Whereas the St Giles gift shop betrays a
syncretistic and somewhat confused hodge podge of beliefs—pots of honey
jostle for shelf-space with Russian icons, aromatherapy scents, and
books of Scottish ghost stories—Analogue has an admirable clarity of
purpose, a spiritual focus, even a whiff of severity about it. Ghost
stories and other tourist trinkets would not be tolerated here. A Zen
Modernist atmosphere prevails. People speak in whispers.

I leaf through some Gasbook creators’ specials then pluck up the
courage to speak to Analogue's bearded “high priest,” founder Russell
Ferguson. He tells me he was inspired to open the place by reading about
Colette, the curated “select shop” in Paris. He’s still never been to
Colette, but he’s made pilgrimages to Magma in London and Zakka in New
York. Inspired by them, he intends to transform his back room into an
art gallery soon.

I’m impressed. Edinburgh never had a store like this when I lived
there. If it had, it might have changed my life. I ask Russell (who
didn’t go to art college, but opened Analogue after managing from
Edinburgh’s arthouse cinema The Filmhouse) whether he thinks the design
bookshop boom is a product of the ’90s. He tells me that it probably is;
Colette was founded in 1997, Magma in 2000. Russell chose the name
Analogue because, in a post-digital culture, analogue is exactly what
books are; they’re objects, but made special by our immersion in
electrons. The analogue and the digital complement each other.

Right now, Analogue is doing okay thanks to the fact that
intelligent lay people, as well as art students and professional
designers, come in to buy books about design. But Russell thinks that
the cult may be played out within five years; he fully expects to move
on to something else.

Analogue has a selection of music CDs and creative magazines; I open electronica bible The Wire
and glance through some year-end surveys by music journalists. A
paragraph by someone called Richard Henderson catches my eye. “Irony and
solipsism have supplanted the visceral intelligence that, not so long
ago, was the stuff of music,” Henderson complains. “We inhabit, after
all, a landscape where digital typefaces carry the cultural purpose once
accorded hit singles.”

Aha! That’s a very telling grouch, a jealous snipe at design from a
music journalist. As a musician turned design commentator myself, I
can’t help wondering whether the sanctity of 1970s rock music (with its
fiercely vocational, charismatic, illuminated gurus, its passionate
converts and adepts) has now passed to design. Do aspirational,
spiritually minded people now turn to “contemporary visual culture” to
fill their god-shaped holes?

Conservative blogger Michael Blowhard seems to think so. In a recent
column he ponders what he sees as design’s pretentious spiritual
tendencies:

“As far as I can tell, for many graphic-design people, ‘good design’
is a crusade. They get worked-up about ‘good design’; for them, the
‘good’ in ‘good design’ is a moral ‘good’ and not just a cool or snazzy
‘good.’ Graphic design can save the world! I find this attitude so
bewildering that I wonder whether graphic designers are initiates in a
cult I know nothing about.”

Blowhard (a conservative who hides his barbs behind impeccable
politeness) finds the source of design’s questionable cultishness in a
book by Alain Weill, Graphic Design: A History:

“I feel like a dimwit for having been so clueless. Wouldn’t you know
it: the idea of ‘graphic design’ was born with our old friend and
curse, Modernism. It had—and in the eyes of many graphic designers still
has—a revolutionary program. Which means that, by my standards anyway,
‘graphic design’ really is a bit of a cult. Evidently you either believe
in the program and you draw your energy from it, or you aren’t a real
graphic designer.”

It’s certainly true that many Modernist creators had high-flown
spiritual rhetoric to match their utopian political agendas. Architect
Mies Van Der Rohe, for instance, said “Architecture is the real battle
of the spirit” and believed that “God is in the details”. According to
Mies, “the battle for the New Dwelling is only a part of the larger
struggle for new ways of living.”

The tone is strikingly similar to the Magma website. “Once books
were carriers of light and knowledge,” Magma solemnly informs surfers.
“They were worshipped and they were feared. They were recognised as a
rich and reactive substance, a highly nourishing and volatile matter... A
powerful source. Our hope is that when people walk into Magma they will
realize something, something will have changed in the way they perceive
things... We hope Magma won’t be just a place that sells books,
magazines, brochures, CD-ROMS, DVDs, objects, toys, t-shirts... We hope
that Magma will become a way of watching the world change and evolve.”

Well, here’s my credo. I’m not a designer, but I love design. I love
stores like Analogue, Magma and Zakka. I enter them as reverently as
Philip Larkin entered a church, removing his bicycle clips and doffing
his hat. To me they’re temples to human creativity, places dedicated to
higher values, yes, even spiritual values. In a world that knows the
price of everything and the value of nothing, these stores and the
curated, inspirational printed matter they contain reaffirm my belief
that beauty really is elevating and that every “creator” is a kind of
god. However pompous, pretentious, trendy, vain, empty, elitist or silly
it may appear to non-initiates, our cult does contain values I’d call
“spiritual.” I hope it continues and expands. If we spread the word, the
congregation will rise.